Preacher's Post: Vocation

The Word

Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Luke 4:21-30

Jeremiah hears a call

Jesus angers the congregation

Quotable Words

"the people expect us to solve some problems and not run for the hills...do what's best for the next generation" ~~President Obama

Headline Words

The State of the Union

Preachable Words:

Preachers this week have a fascinating collection of texts from the lectionary and the news: Jeremiah's call story, Jesus getting run to the edge of the cliff by the angry mob at Nazareth, and President Barak Obama's first State of the Union address.

Jeremiah and Jesus both are called to step up to the plate and deliver the the hard message to the people. The call heard in Wednesday night's address to Congress was a call for bold leadership, to step up to the plate and do the work the people elected the Congress to do: pass health care reform, for starters.

Rev. Rayfield Burns, writing for the Washington Post, writes that the call to "do what's best for the next generation" is a call for moral leadership:

"Scripture teaches us that a moral community does what is necessary to protect the lives of each member of society; it makes room at the table of plenty for everyone. It is long past time that we made room at the life-sustaining health care table of plenty for everyone of God's children."

He goes on to say that politics ought not to be a blood sport, but rather the means through which we come to the table, articulate our views, listen to each other, and solve problems for the common good, dispite our differences. I think that's a pretty good definition of politics, and I also think it's a definition, or should be, of religion, at least religion when it enters the public square.

The President has a hard job, but so do we all, beginning with Sunday's preachers: it's time for a call for moral leadership and public action, on behalf of the 50 million uninsured Americans without access to health care and the 15 million unemployed, for starters.

People across the globe are rallying to re-build Haiti, and this is a good thing. It's time to step up to the plate with the complex matters of reforming America's health care and financial systems, lest we abandon the next generation. We are called, all of us in the pulpits and the pews, to moral leadership.